{"id":231,"date":"2009-08-03T17:49:23","date_gmt":"2009-08-03T21:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web1prod.sunflowerit.ca\/wordpress\/?p=231"},"modified":"2025-07-03T15:11:29","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T19:11:29","slug":"lhasa-tibet-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/china-2009\/trips-asia\/other-trips\/lhasa-tibet-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Lhasa (Tibet): Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As promised, Mr Cheng from our Kunming Travel Agency who arranged our Tibet Travel Entry permit, picked us up at our hotel at 5:30am for our 7am flight to Lhasa. We checked in and passed security at which point Mr Cheng wished us a good trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While waiting for our flight, we noticed that the flight had a stop-over in Shangri-La \u2013 the town we had just come back two days ago. Jenny pointed out, and I agreed, that we made somewhat of a trip planning mistake by flying to Lhasa from Kunming instead of Shangri-La. Although, when we had met Mr Cheng for the initial booking of our trip to Tibet, we still had some hope of visiting Jinghong in the south of Yunnan province, which would have justified returning to Kunming. But bottom line, we spent unnecessarily the airfare from Shangri-La to Kunming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite a few foreigners boarded in Shangri-La. The flight to Lhasa went well. Everybody was looking our the plane window on landing. We were awaited by our guide at the airport and given a \u201cWelcome to Tibet\u201d white scarf. The distance between the airport and the Lhasa city center is over 65 kms. I kept wondering why the airport would be so far away but after looking at the rivers and mountains on the way into town, I thought 65 kms wasn’t too bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our guide was a local Tibetan, unfortunately his English was only slightly better than my Chinese. Our first impression on the Tibetan landscape: the mountains were without any trees, mostly brownish with patches of green grassland; the river appeared more like a flood plain. Upon our arrival in Lhasa, we are surprised by its size, we were expecting a small town similar to Shangri-La. Our Guide and Jenny visited a few hotels before we found something reasonable and within our budget. We had been told that a two-star hotel in is like a one-star hotel in the rest of China. We stopped our choice on the ShangBala Hotel, a three star hotel and our most expensive accommodation to-date. The room is small but the hotel location is great.<\/p>\n\n\n